


Bed's too big without you

by victoria_p (musesfool)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-04-29
Updated: 2005-04-29
Packaged: 2018-09-15 09:35:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9228965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musesfool/pseuds/victoria_p
Summary: I can't sleep with your memory / Dreaming dreams of what used to be





	

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to as always Jen, Pete/Melissa, Dot, and Meg. Thanks to [](http://mousapelli.livejournal.com/profile)[mousapelli](http://mousapelli.livejournal.com/) for the once-over. Title and summary from "The Bed's Too Big Without You" by the Police. For [](http://contrariwise.livejournal.com/profile)[contrariwise](http://contrariwise.livejournal.com/)'s [Two Line Poetry Challenge](http://www.livejournal.com/users/memorycharm/193782.html).

Remus is away again, on Order business. Sirius sprawls in the bed they share, too hot under the comforter but too chilly in the late October night air to sleep with just the sheet.

During the day, he's actually glad Remus is gone, because it means he doesn't have to see him and pretend everything's going to be all right. He doesn't have to watch and analyze Remus's every word and movement for evidence of betrayal or innocence. He doesn't have to be this person he's become, when Remus isn't around to see the show.

But at night, alone in the bed that still holds the scent of Remus's hair, the imprint of his body, Sirius can't sleep. He buries his face in Remus's pillow and strokes until he comes, and afterward falls into a fitful sleep.

If the pillow is damp with tears when he wakes, there's no one there to question it, and he faces the grey dawn light with dry and shadowed eyes.

*

Remus lies alone in a twin bed that always smells slightly of cabbage and the damp. He believes he deserves this isolation.

If he'd only seen, only been willing to look... But he'd buried himself in the work Dumbledore gave him and was willfully blind to the changes in Sirius towards the end -- his moody silences and furtive looks, the way he never quite met Remus's eyes anymore. Remus ignored the signs because he wanted to believe Sirius loved him -- that he was worthy of being loved -- and everybody else paid the price.

He never brings the men he fucks to this squalid bedsit he can't quite call home. Tells them the landlady would go spare if he did, when he tells them anything at all. But that's not the real reason, and the situation doesn't change when he's living in a riad in Marrakech, a hostel in West Berlin, or the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor's quarters at Hogwarts.

The one time he relents (winter, nineteen eighty-seven, an empty bungalow on the beach at Amagansett), allows himself to be entangled, he spends the summer watching another man die a slow, wasting death, as much an outcast among Muggles as Remus is among wizards.

Now he lies alone in a bed that smells of cheap laundry detergent and June heat, Dumbledore's letter clutched in his hand, and waits for Sirius to arrive.

*

Sirius lies curled up like a comma, knees drawn almost to his chest, though the bed is big enough to fit at least three. In this house, in this bed that was his Uncle Rigel's, he can't quite remember what it's like to be free, to take up space as if he owns it, as if he belongs.

Remus is away, and Sirius finds he hates it even more this time around, when it reminds him of the dark days of the last war, when they fucked infrequently and spoke even less.

Things are different this time, but alone in the dark, it's easy to forget. He is tempted to turn into Padfoot, or to go downstairs and drink himself to sleep, but he refuses to be beaten by an empty bed in an empty house.

The grey light of dawn is filtering in through the curtains, and Sirius's eyes are still open, gritty and sore from the lack of sleep, when Remus pushes the door open and stumbles into the room. Purple shadows ring his eyes and he smells of damp wool and cigarette smoke, but Sirius doesn't care.

They come together with fumbling hands and languid mouths, drowsy touches of reassurance that end in sleepy satisfaction.

When Sirius wakes, Remus is wrapped around him, and the bed -- the house, the world -- is too small to contain the upswell of contentment Sirius feels.

*

Remus used to be able to fall asleep anywhere, and he used to sleep like the dead. Now when he closes his eyes, all he sees is Sirius falling, and the fluttering curtains on the window remind him of the veil.

He lies in bed and watches the shadows dance along the wall, replaying memories like Muggle films when he closes his eyes. He wishes for a Pensieve, for oblivion, for an escape from the past that won't stay properly past the way it should, and in the next heartbeat he wishes for a resurrection, a return, a reunion with the dead, on this side of the veil or the other.

He keeps to his side of the bed, his body still hoping on some instinctive level for Sirius to reappear, to join him. But when he rolls over, the sheets are cool and smell of laundry soap and Molly's lavender sachet, without a hint of Sirius left.

Remus thinks he may never sleep again, and he's angry that dreams, the last refuge for him and Sirius to be together, have been taken from him this way.

end


End file.
